Wild Americas - Part 8: Maned Wolves

 

This is the eighth installment in a series of posts touring my British zoo, named Wild Americas. You can read an introduction for it here.

In this post, I'm going to showcase the first expansion to Wild Americas which adds 13 new species, including maned wolves, raccoons, Arctic foxes, armadillos and reindeers. The expansion covers 4.4 acres and includes a Small Animal House and Butterfly House. It connects into the original zoo's path system via the side of the jaguars:

The immediate view of the enclosure can be seen below. As you can see, the path meanders alongside the front part of it, providing a wide-angle view. Maned wolves are known to be shy animals that sometimes prove tricky to see in real zoos, so I figured having as many viewing angles as possible would be a good thing:

I chose to dry moat the enclosure as doing so provided a clearer view of the animals without the interruption of chain link and glass reflections. The moat provides a gap of around 4 metres, at a depth of around 3 metres. The main part of the enclosure is also elevated to the same height as the path:

Maned wolves are probably better known as grassland animals, so I made most of the enclosure grass with a few shrubs here and there. I also added in a shallow pond as they've been known to explore wetlands. Having a pond for the animals to drink from also negates the need for water bowls which is an added plus:

The inner perimeter of the enclosure is chainlink which has an anti-climb overhang. I decided to add an overhang as most of the maned wolf enclosures I saw online either had one or hot wire. You can see some examples here, here and here. Another reason is the fact I didn't want the fence to be too high; I wanted it to be the same height as the outer fence but that would have been too short without the overhang:

Something I overlooked when building this enclosure is the maned wolf's ability to dig. Some zoos seem to add anti-digging measures, as seen here for example. It's something I'll probably add in the future:

Maned wolves aren't exclusively found in grasslands and can be found in forests, among other areas, so I made sure to include some trees. These trees also had the added benefit of concealing the housing in the background:

In the next post, we're going to visit the Small Animal House.